by Zadie Smith
“Am I losing my mind?” Marlon asked. “Or did you say Bethlehem?”
Michael adjusted the rearview mirror until he could see Marlon, stretched out on the backseat, reading a book and breaking into the emergency Twinkies, which Michael thought they had all agreed to save till Allentown.
“It’s a town in Pennsylvania,” Michael said. “We’ll stop there, eat, and then we’ll go again.”
“Are you reading?” Elizabeth asked. “How can you be reading at this moment?”
“What should I be doing?” Marlon inquired, somewhat testily. “Shakespeare in the Park?”
“I just don’t understand how a person can be reading when their country is under attack. We could all die at any moment.”
“If you’d read your Sartre, honey, you’d know that was true at all times in all situations.”
Elizabeth scowled and folded her twinkling hands in her lap. “I just don’t see how a person can read at such a time.”
“Well, Liz,” Marlon said, laying it on thick, “let me enlighten you. See, I guess I read because I am what you’d call a reader. Because I am interested in the life of the mind. I admit it. I don’t even have a screening room: no, instead I have a library. Imagine that! Imagine that! Because it happens that my highest calling in life is not to put my fat little hands in a pile of sandy shit outside Grauman’s—”
“Oh, brother, here we go.”
“Because I actually aspire to comprehend the ways and inclinations of the human—”
“These people are trying to kill us!” Liz screamed, and Michael felt it was really time to intervene.
“Not us,” he ventured. “I guess, like, not especially us.” But then a thought came to him. “Elizabeth, you don’t think . . .?”
He had not thought this thought until now—he had been too busy with logistics—but now he began to think it. And he could tell everyone else in the car was thinking it, too.
“How would I know?” Liz cried, twisting her biggest ring around her smallest finger. “Maybe! First the financial centers, then the government folks, and then—”
“The very important people,” Michael whispered.
“Wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Marlon said, turning solemn. “We’re exactly the kinds of sons of bitches who’d make a nice trophy on some crazy motherfucker’s wall.”
He sounded scared, at last. And hearing Marlon scared made Michael as scared as he’d been all day. You never want to see your father scared, or your mother cry, and, as far as Michael’s chosen family went, that’s exactly what was happening right now, in this bad Japanese car that did not smell of new leather or new anything. It made him wish he’d tried harder to bring Liza along. On the other hand, maybe that would have been worse. It was almost as if his chosen family were as crushing to his emotional health as his real family! And that thought was really not one that he could allow himself to have on this day of all days—on any day.
“We’re all under a lot of strain,” Michael said. His voice was a little wobbly, but he didn’t worry about crying; that didn’t happen easily anymore, not since he’d tattooed around his tear ducts. “This is a very high-stress situation,” he said. He tried to visualize himself as a responsible, humane father, taking his kids on a family road trip. “And we have to try and love each other.”
“Thank you, Michael,” Elizabeth said, and for a couple of miles all was peaceful. Then Marlon started in again on the ring.
“So these Krupps. They make the weapons that knock off your people, by the millions—and then you buy up their baubles? How does that work?”
Elizabeth twisted around in the front seat until she could look Marlon in the eye.
“What you don’t understand is that when Richard put this ring on my finger it stopped meaning death and started meaning love.”
“Oh, I see. You have the power to turn death into love, just like that.”
Elizabeth smiled discreetly at Michael. She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed hers back. “Just like that,” she whispered.
Marlon snorted. “Well, good luck to you. But back in the real world a thing is what it is, and thinking don’t make it otherwise.”
Elizabeth took a compact from a hidden fold of her stole and reapplied some very red lipstick. “You know,” she told him, “Andy once said it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as my ring. That’s an actual quotation.”
“Sounds about right,” Marlon said, spoiling the moment and sounding pretty sneery, which seemed, to Michael, more than a little unfair, for whatever you thought about Andy personally, as a person, surely if anybody had understood their mutual suffering, if anyone had predicted, prophet-like, the exact length and strength and connective angles and occasionally throttling power of their three-way love thread, it was Andy.
“‘It is no gift I tender,’” Marlon read, very loudly. “‘A loan is all I can; But do not scorn the lender; Man gets no more from Man.’”
“This is not the time for poetry!” Elizabeth shouted.
“This is exactly the time for poetry!” Marlon shouted.
Just then, Michael remembered that there were a few CDs in the glove box. If he believed in anything, he believed in the healing power of music. He reached over to open it and passed the cases to Elizabeth.
“I honestly don’t think we should stop in Ohio,” she said, examining them and then pushing a disk into the slit. “We could take turns driving. We’ll drive through the night.”
“I can’t drive when I’m tired,” Marlon said, hitching himself up into a semi-upright position. “Or hungry. Maybe I should do my shift now.”
“And I’ll do the night shift,” Michael said, brightening, and he began looking for a place to stop. He could not get over how well he was handling the apocalypse so far. Sure, he was terrified, but, at the same time, oddly elated and—vitally—not especially medicated, for his assistant had all his stuff, and he hadn’t told her he was escaping from New York until they were already on the road, fearing his assistant would try to stop him, as she usually tried to stop him doing the things he most wanted to do. Now he was beyond everyone’s reach. He struggled to think of another moment in his life when he’d felt so free. Was that terrible to say? He had to confess to himself that he felt high, and now tried to identify the source. The adrenaline of self-survival? Mixed with the pity, mixed with the horror? He wondered: Is this the feeling people have in war zones and the like? Or—another strange thought—was this in fact what civilian people generally feel every day of their lives, in their sad old rank-smelling Toyota Camrys, sitting in traffic on their way to their workplaces, or camping outside your hotel window, or fainting in front of your dancing image on the JumboTron? This feeling of no escape from your situation—of forced acceptance? Of no escape even from your escape?
“Marlon, did you know that when Liz and I, when we have sleepovers . . .?” Michael said, a little too quickly, and aware that he was babbling, but unable to stop. “Well, I really don’t sleep at all! Not one wink. Unless you literally knock me out? I’m literally awake all night long. So I’m good to drive all the way to Brentwood. I mean, if we have to.”
“Don’t stop till you get enough,” Marlon murmured, and lay back down.
“I dreamed a dream in time gone byyyyyy,” Liz sang, along with the CD, “when hope was high and life worth liviiiiiiing. I dreamed that love would never diiiiie! I prayed that God would be for-giviiiiing.”
It was the sixth or seventh go-round. They were almost in Harrisburg, having been considerably slowed by two stops at Burger King, one at McDonald’s, and three separate visits to KFC.
“If you play that song one more time,” Marlon said, eating a bucket of wings, “I’m going to kill you myself.”
* * *
• • •
The sun was setting on the deep-orange polyvinyl-chloride blinds in their booth, a
nd Michael felt strongly that his new role as the Decider must also include some aspect of spiritual guidance. To that end, he passed Marlon the maple syrup and said, in his high-pitched but newly determined tones, “You know, guys, we’ve driven six hours already and, well, we haven’t talked at all about what happened back there.”
They were sitting in an IHOP, just the other side of the Appalachian Mountains, with their mirrored shades on, eating pancakes. Michael had decided—two fast-food joints and eighty miles ago—to leave his usual disguise in the trunk of the car. It had become obvious that it wasn’t necessary, no, not today. And now, with an overwhelming feeling of liberation, he removed his shades, too. For as it was in KFC, in Burger King, and beneath the Golden Arches, so it was in this IHOP: every soul in the place was watching television. Even the waitress who served them watched the television while she served, and spilled a little hot coffee on Michael’s glove, and didn’t say sorry and didn’t clean it up, nor did she notice that Marlon wasn’t wearing shoes—or that he was Marlon—or that resting beside the salt shaker was a diamond as big as the Ritz.
“I feel like one minute we were in the Garden, and it was a dream,” Elizabeth said, slowly. “And we were happy, we were celebrating this marvelous boy”—she squeezed Michael’s hand—“celebrating thirty years of your wonderful talent, my dear, and everything was just beautiful. And then—” She hugged her coffee mug with both hands and brought it to her lips. “And then, well, ‘the tigers came’—and now it really feels like the end of days. I know that sounds silly, but that’s how it feels to me. There’s a childlike part of me that just wants to rewind twenty-four hours.”
“Make that twenty-four years,” Marlon snapped, but with his classic wry Marlon smile, and all you could do was forgive him. “Scratch that,” he said, hamming it up now. “Make it forty.”
Elizabeth pursed her lips and made an adorable comic face. She looked like Amy in Little Women, doing some sly calculation in her head. “Come to think of it,” she said, “forty would work out just swell for me, too.”
“Not me,” Michael said, letting a lot of air out of his mouth in a great rush so that he would be brave enough to say what he wanted to say, whether or not it was appropriate, whether or not it was the normal kind of thing you said in abnormal times like these. But perhaps this was his only real advantage, in this moment, over every other person in the IHOP and most of America: nothing normal had ever happened to him, not ever, not in his whole conscious life. And so there was a little part of him that was always prepared for the monstrous, familiar with it, and familiar, too, with its necessary counterbalancing force: love. He reached across the table and took the hands of his two dear friends in his own.
“I don’t want to be in any other moment than this one,” he told them. “Here. With you two. No matter how awful it gets. I want to be with you and with all these people. With everyone on earth. In this moment.”
They were all silent for a second, and then Marlon raised his still-gorgeous eyebrows, sighed, and said, “Hate to break it to you, buddy, but you don’t have much choice about it either way. Looks like no one’s gonna beam us up. Whatever this shit is—” he gestured toward the air in front of them, to the molecules within the air, to time itself—“we’re stuck in it, just like everybody.”
“Yes,” Michael said. He was smiling, and it was the presence of a smile—unprecedented in that IHOP, on that day—that, more than anything else, finally attracted the waitress’s attention. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”
BIG WEEK
1
He sat in the dive bar on Sherman, looking out at his house, on the other side of the street. The panels were buckled along the porch, and deep, ugly breaches scored the white clapboard—they had sort of an agonized look about them. But come spring—if spring ever came—he would fix it all up for her, repaint and reseal, whatever needed doing. That went for the oil tank, too. He would carry on doing whatever was necessary around the place, because he loved her and saw nothing but good in her, and she still loved him—in the largest sense of that word—and people would just have to wrap their heads around that fact.
“But how’s it work exactly?” asked a Mr. Frank Everett, whose one-room bar it was. He came out from behind the counter and joined his only customer at the window. “Not your house anymore, is it?”
He was looking straight past Everett, off into some noble horizon, though when Everett followed his gaze all he saw was a rack of Twinkies sweating in the window of the gas station.
“That’s correct,” he told Everett, “I’m giving it to her. She deserves it. And anything she needs doing, I’ll do it for her, she only has to ask. I’m happy to do it. I want her to be happy.”
Everett lifted a half-full glass and put a cardboard coaster beneath it.
“See, that’s the bit I don’t get. You still go to church with her. She makes you cookies.”
“She makes me cookies.”
The manager folded his arms and took on a look of priestly awe, as if Marie’s cookies were truly the Alpha and Omega. He was not Irish, Frank, nor even from Boston, but had once been married to the type and felt he understood his customers; their tastes and habits, their humor.
“Got to the point with my Annette,” he confessed, covering his eyes with a dishrag, “and I don’t mind telling you—got to the point wherein I was gonna hire someone to kill her. No word of a lie.” He measured a tiny gap with the fingers of his free hand: “I was this close.”
He whipped the rag aside and laughed amiably, but the man—whose name was Michael Kennedy McRae—sat unsmiling and reproachful, like a puppy thwacked on the nose with a rolled-up Herald.
“Well,” McRae said, flushing a little, “I’d have to say it’s not that way for us. We’ve cried and we’ve held each other. A lot of people round here may think of me different these days . . . She never did.”
Went back to staring nobly out the window. There seemed no way to tell him that his face was green, the consequence of a pair of fluorescent shamrocks attached to the glass.
“McRae—you’re unusual,” said Frank, patting him on the back, though he did not find him unusual in any particular. There were five McRae siblings and they were all of them talkers. And they all looked like Donald O’Connor, more or less—even the women.
“Want another?” asked Frank, after a minute, and got no reply. “Hey, McRae. You’re not sore over that little Annette joke are you? That’s stupid.”
Yet it was true enough he would not have dared make such a gag in front of McRae a few months ago. Wouldn’t have joked about as much as a parking ticket.
“McRae?”
Half-standing on his stool, big square head craned urgently leftwards. An old bull, rising up from its knees. Everett could see the outline of tensed muscles from here, even through slacks. Primed! People don’t change. They could fire McRae ten more times—he’d always be a cop.
“Sorry, Frank, you must want to get home. Should have said—I’m waiting for my boy. Thought that was his car. It won’t be much longer. He’s probably just caught behind a gritter somewhere. He’s coming from the art school.”
Frank looked up and worked a dishcloth round the inside of a quart glass.
“Makes no difference to me. I don’t close for snow and I don’t close for empty. I don’t close.”
“With three boys, everybody said—well, you know, all the usual warnings. But he’s in the middle—natural born peacemaker. Marie’s idea is he’s the gentlest of all of them. God bless him. We’re so proud of him. I mean, we worry, too. I shouldn’t have said art school—it’s the Art Institute. Different place. Not painting—‘graphic arts.’ That worries her, a little. I don’t know.”
“Plenty of call for graphics. Everything’s made out of graphics.”
“We’ll see.”
Fifteen minutes later a tall young man in a Red Sox cap parked his
mother’s car outside the family home and trudged through the snow in unsuitable shoes. He was a head and shoulders lankier than his father, skinnier, too, and his face, though good-natured and open, did not have Mike’s sharp architecture. He shook the powder from his feet and smiled bemusedly as his father met him at the threshold of the bar, hugged the boy tightly round his middle, and burst into unabashed tears.
“Hey, Dad . . . Hey, it’s all right. Let’s sit. You’re getting yourself all worked up.”
The son maneuvered them inside into the warm. The look of ardent love in the father’s eyes was such that even Frank, ten yards away, felt oppressed by it.
“Oh, boy, look at that: cried on you,” said McRae, poking at the wet patches on his son’s shirt, while the young man gazed calmly down at his father’s finger, waiting for him to finish. Something about this scene put Frank in mind of St. Thomas, up to the knuckle in stigmata. But of course that was the kid’s name: Tommy.
“Boy oh boy, I’m sorry . . . And the thing that’s nuts is I’m not even sad! I’m so grateful and blessed right now! Look at me! I’m the luckiest man in the world.”
“Okay, Dad. Let’s sit, though. Let’s just sit right here.”
Gently the younger McRae pried the elder’s hands off his person, held them for a moment between his own, then placed them gently on the table.
“Sorry I’m late. You look well, Dad.”
“Nah, I’m ten pounds over. Fifteen. I can’t run—so. All I know is running and cycling. And the doctor’s put the nix on both. I gotta figure out what I can do now! Driving’s got me sitting down all day.” McRae reached over and played a strange sort of jig on his son’s knees. “Hey, you going over to your mother’s after?”
“Um . . . Sure.”
“Good, that’s good.”
Frank came over with a pair of Guinnesses, on a tray no less.
“Your old man instructed me,” he said, and set the sloping drinks down. “He was real clear: when the kid comes, bring out the black stuff, it’s his favorite.”
